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A finely reasoned justification of the cultural and political in dependence of small nations in the New Europe. Attacking Professor E. H. Carr, G. D. H.
Cole and otliers, the author maintains that the small nations were and will remain a danger to the peace of Europe only as long as power politics continues to be the underlying principle of Euro
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THE
RIGHTS OF NATIONS
THE
RIGHTS OF NATIONS
bj)
CZESLAW POZNANSKI
LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LTD.
BROADWAY HOUSE, 68-74 CARTER LANE, E.C.4
First published 1942
Printed in Great Britain by Bude, fc Tanner Ltd., Frame and London THIS BOOK IS PRODUCED
IN COMPLETE CONFORMITY WITH THE AUTHORIZED ECONOMY STANDARDS
“ The equality of nations upon which peace must be founded, if it is to last must be an equality of rights ; the guarantees exchanged must neither recog nize nor imply a difference between big nations and small, between those that are powerful and those that are weak.”
(Woodrow Wilson, address to Congress on January 22, 1917).
INTRODUCTION
In Professor E. H. Carr’s latest book, Conditions of Peace, there is a particularly illuminating passage. Professor Carr writes : “ The industries of Upper Silesia on one side, and of the Ruhr and Lorraine on the other, are natural economic units. It would be futile to break up these units on grounds ofself-determination, and equally futile to attempt to exclude Germans from an effective share in their management and exploitation.”
Professor Carr was one ofthe artificers of the Munich agreement and one of the enthusiasts forit. To this day he considers Munich a major and a beneficent diplomatic achievement. The only fault he finds with the policy of Neville Chamberlain is that Chamberlain condemned the annexation of Austria. Professor Carr does not believe that there can be any moral principles in foreign policy. “ There are no simple and infallible rules of
‘ principle ’ and ‘ right’ to determine foreign policy in a given situation.” Not even the criterion of aggression
“ was either equitably applicable or morally valid.”
He does not believe in human rights •: “ Thus for the realist the equality of man is the ideology of the under privileged seeking to raise themselves to the level ofthe privileged ; the indivisibility of peace the ideology of States which, being particularly exposed to attacks, are eager to establish the principle that an attack on them is a matter of concern to other States more fortunately situated. . . .” For Professor Carr the self-determina tion of nations is simply a corollary of the laissez-faire economic policy, without any intrinsic validity. The only “ realist ” approach for him is that of power politics.
■ oruniU
Introduction
It is not to people who concur in these opinions that this book is addressed. Nothing I say will convince them. For the underlying assumption of this book is thatthe rights of man are more important than the rights of iron and coal. I for one believe that the supreme values we are fighting for are human values. I believe that we are fighting for a world in which the rights of man proclaimedby the American and theFrenchRevolu
tions, and suppressed by the totalitarian regimes, will not only be established as paramount, but enlarged to embrace the economic rights ofman as well as his political and human rights. And I know that national rights are a necessary part of the rights of man.
Professor Carr and his friends consider these opinions reactionary. I, for one, shall always prefer to be a reactionary professing the ideals of Mazzini and Mickie wicz, rather than a progressive with the men of Munich and the admirers of Franco.
The acceptance, however,ofthefallacies of “ economic necessities,” and the lack of comprehension of the inter
dependence between national rights and national state
hood, and of the difference between a world based on the necessaryvoluntary collaboration of all nations, great and small alike, and a world based on the principle of the “ hegemony ” of the Great Powers, are widespread even among those people who recognize the principles of the rights of man and of international morality. It is to these people that I appeal.
This book does not pretend to make an exhaustive study of the problems concerned. It is, as Mr. Cole wrote of one of his books, “ an uncompleted process of thinking aloud ”. It has been writtenin some haste, for I considered it necessary that at this moment a voice from the Continent should intervene in the discussions about the future of the Continent. One more word:
Introduction
this book is sometimes harsh in expression. I hope, however, that my readers will forgive this shortcoming in a foreigner who has not yet mastered the gentle English art ofunderstatement.
CZESLAW POZNANSKI.
I
1 HE pattern of the first World War was very similar to the pattern of other wars ; the difference lay only in its scale. The clash of 1914 was mainly a clash between contending Great Powers—Germany, which wanted to establish its hegemony over the continent of Europe and the Middle East, and the Allied Powers, which opposed this bid for supremacy. It might have been apurely continental war, a contest between Germany and Austria on the one side and Russia allied with France on the other. Great Britain was dragged into thewar onlybythe violation of theneutrality of Belgium ; the United States bythe unrestricted submarine warfare.
Even so, British Ministers resigned in opposition to the war, a section of the Labour Party opposed it to the end, and in the United States there was likewise a strong anti-war minority. As for the European neutrals, they were mere onlookers whose sympathies were divided and dictated by scores of different reasons, but who were all persuaded of one thing—that it did notgreatly matter to them which of the belligerents emerged as victor.
Toward the end of the war, however, ideological factors made their appearance. The appalling destruc
tion of the war, and above all the destruction ofmillions of young lives, produced a revulsion of feeling in the civilized countries. People realized the madness of this wholesale slaughter ; and they realized that something must be done to preventits repetition. From the water
logged trenches, where the French poilu suffered un
speakable hardships, came the slogan “ la der des der ”
—the very last war. And in Great Britain the same feel ing foundexpression in the slogan “ the war toend war”.
I B
The Rights of Nations
impossiblefor nineteenth-century Europe to live atpeace.
The wars for the unity of Italy and the Balkan wars were wars of independence. From the first days of its partition Poland was an open wound in the body of Europe ; as Ireland was in the body of Great Britain.
A Hungary unconcerned with the suppression of the Croats could have lived on good-neighbourly terms with Serbia instead ofbeing bent onthe crushing of the Serbs.
And just as within a nation the juridical and political equality of all citizens, without regard to differences of birth, wealth, or even education, is the basis of a demo cratic order, so the equality of all nations, irrespective of the number of warships, tanks, or guns they could muster, irrespective of their power and wealth, was the only sound basis for an international order. Great and small nations alike were to be equal in partnership, equally protected by the new international law against aggression from more powerful neighbours. The rule of unanimity in the deliberations of the League Council and the League Assembly, whatever its merits and demerits in practice, was the symbolic expression of this equality of all nations.
Collective security and the independence and equality of nations were thus closely correlated. The second principle associated with collective security, with the freedom from fear, was democracy. When in 1917 Woodrow Wilson spoke ofthe war 66 to make the world
‘safe for democracy”, the full implications of this state
ment were well understood by the masses. The responsi
bility of the autocratic rulers of Germany and Austria, afterwards obscured by a deluge of propaganda, was not yet forgotten. There was no doubt at that moment that a dictatorial, irresponsible ruler was much more easily tempted to wage war than the government of a demo cratic country.
The Rights of Nations
It was out of this desire never to see another such dreadful holocaust of youth that the realization of the necessity ofan international organization arose in nearly all the belligerent countries.
Robert Cecil, General the plans of this future the veteran of French several times refused to
Republic, Léon Bourgeois ; in the United States the leader of the nation, Woodrow Wilson. It was Wilson who proclaimed in an official document, his “ Fourteen Points”, the necessity of an organization to ensure a lasting peace. And it was thanks to Wilson’s insistence that the Covenant of theLeague of Nations was embodied in the Peace Treaties. The League of Nations was to guarantee that “ freedom from fear ” which is one of the essential freedoms of the nations.
This first attempt to eliminate war by means of world organization was based on three main principles. The first of these was the self-determination of nations. A real League of Nations could only be a League of free nations. The domination of one nation over another was inconsistent with a new and just world order. It was obviously impossible to draw frontier lines in ethno- graphically mixed areaswithoutincludingcertainnational minorities in the framework of certain States, but the principle was laid down that every nation had the right to independence, the right to live in its own nation- State.
It was not only a consideration of abstractjustice that linked the idea of the self-determination of nations with the idea of security from war ; more realistic factors were involved. A subjugated nation was a permanent menace to peace, for it was primarily the irrepressible national struggles for independence that had made it In Great Britain Lord Smuts, and others, worked at world organization ; in France radicalism, the man who had become President ofthe French
3
The Rights of Nations
Finally, the new organization was to be based on
“ freedom from want”. The rights of labour were linked up with the principles of self-determination of nations and of democracy. The organization of the I.L.O. was embodied in Part XIII of the Versailles Treaty. Each Member State of the League of Nations was automatically a member of the I.L.O., and auto
matically committed to the grant of a certain minimum of social security to its own subjects. Article 23 ofthe Covenant states that the Members of the League
“will endeavour to secure fair and humane conditions of labour for men, women, and children, both in their own countries and in all countries to which their commercial and industrial relations extend, and for that purpose will establish and maintain the necessary international organizations.”
Thus the ideasof national independence, of democracy, and of social security appeared as the only basis on which a lasting peace could be founded. In the minds of the people of 1919 they were intimately correlated, just as they were intimately correlated in the minds of
Karl Marx and the founders of the First International, who put on the same plane the fight for the liberation of the proletariat and the fight for the liberation of the oppressed nationalities. The full text of the slogan of the First International was, in fact, “Workers of the world and oppressed nationalities, unite”.
These fundamental issues and their intimate inter connexion were, however, first obscured in the hagglings of the Peace Conference and then gladly and completely forgotten. The recognition of the necessary connexion between collective security and democracy was the first to be obliterated. It disappeared almost entirely from the text of the Covenant. Only in Article I, in the first words of the sentence “ Any fully self-governing State,
The Rights of Nations
Dominion, or Colony not named in the annex may become a Member of the League” can a faint echo be caught of President Wilson’s promise to “ make the world safe for democracy ”. As it was, this sentence was invoked once only, when Great Britain questioned the advisability of admitting Ethiopia to the League.
But no body appealed to the League when Mussolini seized power in Italy, or when Hitler established his rule in Germany. The nineteenth-century doctrine of
“ non-interference in internal affairs ”, the doctrine of the mischievousness of “ ideological blocs ”, reigned supreme and unchallenged, culminating in the tragic farce of “ non-intervention ” in Spain.
The equality of nations remained inscribed in the texts of the Covenant, but was never acknowledged in fact. The very constitution of the Council of the League, with its distinction between permanent and elected members, bore the imprint of the discrimination between Great Powers and Powers of “limited interests ”, as the smaller nations were politely called. And the Great Powers did not hesitate to indicate quite clearly that it wasfor them, and for them alone, to settle the big issues and to act accordingly.
When Germany—still the Germany of Chancellor Brüning—withdrew for the first time from the Dis armament Conference, her return on the strength of a promise of equality was negotiated in London by Great Britain, France, and Italy. The Great Powers arrived at an agreement among themselves—the agreement of December 11, 1931—and presented the Disarmament Conference with this agreement as a fait accompli, though the question ofGerman armaments was, to say the least, of as much interest to Poland or to Czechoslovakia as to Italy. The Polish delegate at the Conference made a statement at a plenary meeting to the effect that agree-
The Rights oj Nations
ments negotiated outside the Conference could not be considered as binding membersleftout of the negotiations.
In T933 we had the Four-Power Pact. Ramsay MacDonald suddenly left Geneva and the Conference for Rome, andtheastonishedworldlearnedthatGermany
—the Germany of Hitler—Great Britain, France, and Italy had made an agreement under which major issues were to be settled by the four Great Powers. Economic questions, European frontiers, and so on were to be decided by a directorate consisting of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Ramsay MacDonald, and whoever happened to be Prime Minister of France. This plan collapsed. The Four-Power Pact, when it was finally signed, was much less ambitious, and in due course it was quietly buried. Yet it was in the spirit of the Four-Power Pact that in 1938 the new Czech frontiers were settled at Munich by Hitler, Mussolini, Chamber- lain, and Daladier, with the Czech delegates waiting in an anteroom.
When, in 1934, Hitler introduced military conscription in Germany, in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, France appealed to the League of Nations. But even then the League was to be only a rubber stamp to endorse the findings of Benito Mussolini, Ramsay MacDonald, and Pierre Laval. For the meeting of the Council of the League was preceded by the Stresa Conference, most ill- fated and ridiculous of all conferences. Stresa did not restrain Hitler, but did encourage Mussolini to start his Ethiopian campaign.
The Ethiopian war provided further examples of the disastrous confiscation of the League machinery by the Great Powers, of the attempt to exploit the League, devised as an instrument of collective security, for the game of power politics. First we had the Hoare-Laval plan. I am not concerned now with the plan itself—
6
The Rights oj Nations
enough has been said about it—but with the leger de main, by which certain Powers tried to barter away the biggest issue of all, an issue on which all the peoples of the world had taken their stand against aggression, for a triangular dealbetween Italy, Great Britain, and France.
The sanctions against Italy had been voted. Com
mittees ofthe League were working at their implementa tion. But Pierre Laval did not renounce the. hope of striking a bargain at the expense of Ethiopia. At the end of October 1935, in a “ free and frank interview ”, he succeeded in convincing Sir Samuel Hoare. Follow ing this free and frank interview, both Laval and Sir Samuel declared, at a meeting on November 2 of the Co-ordination Committee, that they would continue their efforts at conciliation. This was the cue for Van Zeeland (who had come from Brussels for the occasion) to propose that the League should give a mandate to Great Britain and France to proceed with this mediation.
The mandate was not given. One after another the delegates of Soviet Russia, Poland, the Little Entente, and Spain explained politely but firmly that the settle ment of the conflict was a task for the entire Council of the League, and that no mandate of any sort could be given. Nevertheless the governments of Great Britain and France continued to negotiate, and the outcome of these negotiations was the Hoare-Laval plan.
This attempt failed. The Members of the League refused to accept the plan, and in Great Britain the popular indignation swept away Sir Samuel Hoare.
But the independent rôle of the Great Powers was not finished. For the lifting of sanctions in the Ethiopian affair, whichsounded the death-knellof collective security, was due to a unilateral decision made by Great Britain.
Formally the sanctions were lifted by the League Assembly. In fact they were disposed of on June 18,
7
ft?:
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The Rights ojNations
1936, when Anthony Eden announced to the Commons that the British Government considered it necessary to put an end to the sanctions.
There is a little anecdote that perfectly epitomizes the attitude of the Great Powers in the inter-war period.
At the Lausanne Conference in 1932, which was to settle finally the question of German Reparation pay ments, all negotiations were conducted betweenGermany (von Papen), Great Britain (Ramsay MacDonald), and France (Edouard Herriot). Meanwhile representatives of the smaller Allied and Associated Powers, for some of whom the Reparation payments formed more important Budget items than either for France or forGreat Britain, were kicking their heels in the lobby of the conference hotel together with the journalists, sometimes less well informed than the latter.
One day MacDonald walked out, beaming, from the conference room, and announced that a final agreement had been reached and that its signature was imminent.
At the announcement the Yugoslav delegate stepped forward and said : “I hope we shall be able to see the agreement before its signature, and to make our observations.”
“Of course not,” replied MacDonald, indignantly.
It was this attitude, this disregard of the rights and interests ol the smaller nations, culminating in Lord Runciman’s mission and the Munich agreement, that was largely responsible for the tragic drift of the smaller nations into neutrality , at such cost to themselves, and with such grievous detriment to the Allied effort in 1940.
One of the Swedish delegates put the position to me quite bluntly when the sanctions against Italy were lifted. “ We have allowed ourselves to be fooled once.
We enthusiastically voted the sanctions, for we believed 8
The Rights of Nations
that the Great Powers had at last been convinced of the necessity for collective security. Now we see that we have only been pawns in a game ofpower politics. We shall not be fooled a second time.”
Collective security was dead. So was the ideal of collaboration between free nations “equal in status”, to quotethe Balfour reporton the British Commonwealth.
The I.L.O. survived. Thanks largely to a succession of outstanding and courageous men at the helm—Albert Thomas, Harold Butler, John Winant,—it succeeded in developing an admirable activity. This activity was not interrupted by the war, and the Conference of the I.L.O. at New York in January 1941 was proof of the continued vitality of this institution. But the link con necting it with the League of Nations had become a purely formal one. The activities of the I.L.O. at Geneva had had scarcely any connexion with those in the League building only a few hundred yards away.
The conviction that the rights of labour are intimately connected with the peace problem had vanished.
The Cassandras, those of us who issued repeated warnings that dictatorships are a permanent menace to peace, who understood the real meaning of the Japanese aggression, of Mussolini’s robber expedition in Ethiopia, of the conquest of Spain, of the seizure of Austria, were contemptuously dismissed as “ ideologists ” and “war
mongers ”. Yet when Armageddon came the “ ideo logical front” reappeared at once. The climate of the belligerent countries immediately became the climate not of 1914 but of 1918. There still are, of course, people who continue to think in simple imperialistic terms, who hope that once victory is achieved everything will fall back into the old pre-war pattern, who are preparing today for the return of an “ untramelled ” economic system, of the “ competitive struggle for markets”, of
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